The Wilds (14 page)

“It’s big,” she says. “It’s made of something. What do you call it, James?”

“Water,” your father says.

That night, you have nightmares. You are on a vast, dilapidated spaceship that reeks of leaking gas. You move down endless corridors, trip over clusters of ripped-out wiring. You discover a medical area, dim yet stark with flickering fluorescent light. Among the rows of sick
and dying, you find your mother, tucked into a corner, hooked up to a mess of dirty tubes. Before your eyes, she shrinks into the bedding until there is nothing left but a small spot of grease. And when that vanishes, you are aware that the earth no longer exists.

You wake in the throes of a panic attack. Something is rustling beneath your bed. A small head pops up. You recognize the impish grin, the electric hair rollers.

“Good morning.” Your mother stands up, spreads a crumpled garment: a vintage sundress, purple butterflies and ivy.

“This is darling,” she says. “Let me press it.”

Before you can stop her, she’s scurried from the room.

Your father sits in the bright kitchenette. His weathered face droops from the sticky architecture of his hair. The ubiquitous comb-over makes you feel guilty now, for you realize that the hairstyle is more than an absurd quirk of vanity. The crisp helmet is order. The crisp helmet is protective armor. No matter how shitty your father feels when he wakes up in the morning, no matter how
his hands shake, his hour-long grooming ritual restores some semblance of cozy normalcy. He is ready to face the day.

When you were a child, and your father was a civics professor at a community college, he’d fish on Saturdays, the only day of the week that had no claim on him. He’d come home drunk and disheveled, as though he’d turned into a beast out in the wild. Sometimes he’d hide behind doors and leap out at your mother—crazy-haired, redeyed—and she’d shriek with laughter as the wild man caught her in his arms.

“I didn’t realize,” you whisper as you pour coffee. “When did she get this bad?”

“Just this summer,” your father says. “Though it’s been happening for a while. And now, when I think back, I can see that even a few years ago, she started to say peculiar things.”

“What does her doctor say?”

“He calls them ‘senior moments.’ So I’ve made an appointment with a specialist. We’re having some tests done, but I wanted her to have one more vacation. I haven’t told the boys yet, though Jim could tell something was wrong over Christmas.”

Your mother stands in the living room, smiling uncertainly. You don’t know how long she’s been standing there, holding your dress, which is starched and ironed in random spots. She’s wearing lime shorts and a purple top from the 1980s, with enormous shoulder pads and huge brassy buttons, an outfit that you might have worn ironically a few years ago, when you were still striving to be hip. Now that you think about it, you did notice oddities in her dressing style at Christmas (a holiday sweater with warm-up pants and tiny, gold pumps). Remembering how gleefully you’d described her hideous sweater on your blog, you feel ashamed.

Your mother drapes your dress over a chair and lights a cigarette.

“What you want me to fix, honey?” She winks slyly. “Grits and eggs?”

Normally, you’d have something snide to say about instant grits and battery-hen eggs, but you say nothing. You nod. You take a sip of coffee. And when your mother places the food before you, you eat without complaint, just as you did when you were a child.

Although you hate smearing potentially carcinogenic sunscreen all over your body, you must prepare for the
brutal day. You have the expensive, organic stuff that smells like oatmeal and leaves a sticky film. You have a wide-brimmed hat and a long-sleeved sun-shirt made of some kind of futuristic,
UV
-resistant nylon. You have swarms of freckles, and each one is a potential basal-cell carcinoma. As you anoint your spotted body in a ritualistic fashion, you dwell on the sun damage that you suffered summers past, when, young and free and unwisely supervised, you endured at least a half-dozen severe burns, the kind that brought blisters and fever and delirium. You remember moaning in a strange beach house bed, your pale skin scorched, as your dark-skinned brothers howled and scampered through the exotic vegetation outside.

Your childhood has literally left you
scarred
, you think as you ignore your mother’s increasingly desperate knock.
Scathed
, in fact. And you actually say the word aloud for dramatic effect—
scathed
—even though no one can hear you.

You find your mother pacing the hall just outside your door, vinyl purse clamped in her armpit.

“Let’s go,” she says. “Why don’t we go?”

“Where’s Dad?”

“My husband?”

“Yes,” you say, feeling confused. “My father. Your husband.”

“I don’t know.”

You start to panic, wondering what you’d do if your father disappeared. Would you take your mother back to your house? Would you drop her off at her sister’s place? Just as your heartbeat begins to quicken, your father emerges from the bathroom, his comb-over fortified with an extra gust of Aqua Net.

“I’m ready,” he announces, patting his helmet of hair, steeling himself for another long day of fun in the sun.

“I can’t wait to get to Universal Studios,” your mother says. “I can’t wait.”

And she skips out the door.

“When are we getting on the boat?” your mother asks for the tenth time, her voice a brass trumpet. Her legs, skinny and sun-damaged, sticking out of the lime-green shorts, make you think of child burn victims. And then you realize that your mother
was
a child burn victim,
scathed
by the sun, just as you were, though her olive skin was more resistant.

“Be patient,” says your father. “It’s a popular ride.”

You are standing in line at an amusement park beneath a merciless afternoon sun. As you inch closer and closer to the glowing aqua canal, you think of Sisyphus. The heat, the out-gassing asphalt, the fair-food aromas
entice dormant addictions from your cells. You long for a corn dog. You dream of guzzling a Coke. You feel ravenous, thirsty, excitable, sick. You idly spy on the family in front of you—a young black couple with two little boys. Though you sneer at the family’s matching Universal Studios sun visors, you can’t help but soften in the presence of the children, especially when you notice that the older boy is doing his best to terrify his younger brother.

“Sharks can bite through bone,” he says. “They have three hundred and fifty teeth. The teeth grow in rows.”

You fondly recall the days when your own little brothers thought you were an omniscient fairy princess and believed every bit of nonsense you told them. You remember the thrill of pure power as your ridiculous inventions became part of their personal mythology. Perhaps your blog is a feeble attempt to restore this lost power, you think, sighing as you realize that you will never have a captive audience as riveted as your younger brothers once were.

“Sharks are sometimes twenty feet long,” the boy informs his brother, stretching his arms out for emphasis. You do not notice your mother’s crazed grin. You do not see her creeping into the family’s personal space, nor does your father, who gazes longingly at a fake island that dots the horizon.

“Come here, my little black brother,” your mother says, grabbing the smaller boy by the shoulders. His
parents smile tensely as your mother pulls the child close to her grinning face.

“I want you to study hard and go to Carolina,” she says, “because if it weren’t for
you people
, we wouldn’t have a football team.”

Your father winces. The shame you feel overwhelms your nervous system. You are unable to speak. Regressing to teenage coping mechanisms, you step away from your parents and pretend that you are not related to them by blood, that you don’t know them, that you have never seen their faces. Just as you are about to weave off into the crowd in search of a restroom, you hear your father in damage-control mode.